The role of eye contact and emotional contagion in infants' social learning

• Main Author: Keow, Dorcas Shi Hui
• Other Authors: Victoria Leong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2020
• Subjects: Social sciences::Psychology
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/138152
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Early learning is fundamentally a social process. Past studies on infants’ learning had highlighted the importance of joint attention and maternal mirroring. However, studies had yet to ascertain the role of eye contact and emotional mirroring on infants’ social learning. Hence, this paper aims to establish whether the two ostensive communication cues – eye contact and emotional contagion can predict infants’ learning during the affective social learning process. The study involves 16 mother-infant dyads with infants aged 7.5 to 10.5 months, engaged in a social learning paradigm. Mothers were instructed to display positive and negative emotions toward various objects (i.e. maternal demonstration) in the presence of their infant. Subsequently, infants’ behaviour toward these objects was observed and manually coded. It was hypothesized that infants’ behaviour, which indicates learning, would be modulated based on (1) the amount of eye contact the dyads have during the maternal demonstration and (2) infants mirroring their mothers’ emotional expressions during the experiment. Thus, infants’ learning would be enhanced when eye contact and emotional contagion are present simultaneously. However, the results failed to support the hypothesis – eye contact and emotional contagion do not modulate infants’ social learning, both individually and corporately. Though this paper was unable to provide significant findings on eye contact and emotional contagion on infants’ social learning, it might provide a stepping stone for further work to be done. Consequently, encouraging parents and educators to start engaging their child via the social environment, which greatly enhances learning in infants.